Reactie van Mirjam Shatanawi

Dag Ancella,

Dat is prima. 10 december ben ik voor 14.30 beschikbaar. Het liefst spreek ik af om 13 uur. Komt dat uit voor jou? Laat het mij even weten.

Hieronder nog een stukje dat ooit als lesmateriaal op de website http://artworld.uea.ac.uk stond (het is er nu vanaf, vandaar dat ik het gekopieerd heb). Het is een korte maar duidelijke omschrijving van de ‘crisis’.

Met vriendelijke groet,

Mirjam Shatanawi

M.J. Shatanawi
Conservator Midden-Oosten en Noord-Afrika


Ethnographic museums were established towards the end of the nineteenth and in the course of the twentieth century. They were meant to illustrate the ways of life of the populations on which new knowledge was made available because they had just been brought under colonial control. Colonial administrations required knowledge about the subjected populations, and part of that knowledge was produced by anthropologists. While anthropological knowledge had previously been used to demonstrate the validity of Darwinian and other evolutionary thought, anthropology now started using objects to demonstrate the validity of new theories. The new academic discipline of anthropology also depended on the establishment of ethnographic museums for its popularisation.
Breaking away from an evolutionist perspective such as advocated by natural history museums, the ethnographic museum presented the ways of life of colonised populations as contained within bounded, integrated cultures, each with their own artistic style. The material objects in the ethnographic museum were displayed as 'fragments' that embodied the ways of life of particular populations. Non-western societies were thus represented as living in isolation, outside history. After decolonisation this mode of representation was recognised as problematic, and contemporary ethnographic museums still struggle with this 'crisis of representation'.
Attempts to overcome this crisis have consisted of the inclusion of representatives of non-Western populations in the design of exhibits on their ways of life. Other strategies include the display of contemporary material culture, or the simple renunciation of the possibility of just representation. One of the consequences of the latter strategy - which is also part of an attempt to keep an increasingly volatile audience interested - has been the aestheticization of the ethnographic exhibit. Today, the ethnographic museum increasingly looks like an art gallery. Meanwhile, non-western populations, or - as they are increasingly referred to - First Nations, are more and more implicate d in staging their own representations.